austin_dern

Some Morphicon pictures:

The fursuit dance! Kigurumi welcome. It's fairly well-attended for a Morphicon dance, sad to say.

Rocket Raccoon not really wanting to be there at the close of the Morphicon fursuit parade.

Perler beads: a fun new craft activity for Morphicon that we're hoping gets run in future years.

bunny_hugger makes her quasiprofessional puppeteering debut at the Atomic Spectacle of Doom, alongside her charismatic ostrich.

At the DevilbunnyCo job fair, bunny_hugger asks what you think your greatest weakness as an employee is, other than ``being a perfectionist''.

Trivia: Charlemagne's coronation on Christmas Day of the year 800 was also, by at least some church estimates, the first day of the 6000th year of the world. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent The Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.

Currently Reading: Count Belisarius, Robert Graves.

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: into, defining a pretty straightforward term I'd already edged around.

So, feeling a touch like we'd been punched in the gut, we went for dinner. We went back to the burrito place, which did require crossing the highway, although it was late enough in the day that traffic wasn't bad. A little clogged, nothing serious.

We returned to the hotel to do a little more walking-around and interacting with people, and staring at the rubber-projectile combat madness that's the Atomic Battle Of Doom. This would also be a little chance for bunny_hugger to do a bit of fursuiting. She hadn't had much chance to wear her costume the weekend, particularly because the Spectacle of Doom ate up five hours of Saturday night (plus an hour and a half for casting, come to that), and the Fursuit Games were opposite the species SIGs we had run. Plus when it comes to the dances it's easier to go in our kigurumis than in fursuit.

One flaw Morphicon has had is that Sunday nights are frightfully dead; they don't have a Dead Dog Dance or anything, and even the Con Suite was closing early this year. But there was a wonderful something kept open to midnight: they fit an extra night of karaoke in. We'd go there in kigurumi again. And this was a just magnificent way to close out the night, because it gathered people who stuck together and sang at various levels of competence. There were a couple people who could actually sing pretty well, and the guy who was able to do voices well enough that, like, he could sing as Sylvester Stallone doing Frozen's ``Let It Go'' and other such silliness. Yes, ``Don't Stop Believing'' was picked, and even spun out into an everybody-sing-along affair. Somebody asked my advice about picking ``Bohemian Rhapsody'' and I pointed out that while everybody loves the song, it's very musically and lyrically tricky and it lasts about as long as middle school.

Despite that, someone wanted to play it and they started singing it frightfully close to midnight, when orders had come down to close up the karaoke. Yet the guy running karaoke cut the song off midway through, so that bunny_hugger could have one last Paul McCartney song for the night, and for the last song before midnight. Officially, Morphicon was done and there would be sometime in the indefinite future AnthrOhio, maybe with karaoke, maybe not.

As folks kind of broke up and tried not to, I took the computer and pulled up The Animals' ``We Gotta Get Out Of This Place'' and set it playing, though I didn't sing. Nobody did. bunny_hugger said she got it, and while nobody among those left seemed to recognize what I was going, I trusted the right people would get it. We left just before the chorus started, as someone interrupted the mute song. So that closed our last night at Morphicon.

Trivia: In May 1999 72 percent of professional money managers answering a Barron's survey said the stock market was in a speculative bubble; 28 percent said no. Source: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, John Cassidy.

Currently Reading: The Avengers of Carrig, John Brunner.

PS: How May 2015 Treated My Mathematics Blog, my monthly statistical review. Second of these since the last roundup, although given the A-to-Z challenge, there's going to be a third tomorrow if automated posting holds up.

We went just across the street, to Panera, for lunch. This avoided the highway traffic jam --- we'd manage to do that at least on Sunday --- and let us get over to Kroger right after. I was slated to run the Procyonids SIG, and for that would be getting some trash bins for the ceremonial Tipping Over Of The Trash Bins, to reveal candy within. For this I needed candy to put in the bins. We got a couple fun-size packs of things, some Andes mints which would prove very popular, that sort of thing. We couldn't find any party-favor type toys, though. A plastic ring from last year's bin became an armband for my guinea pig puppet, quite successfully. Nothing like that this year.

We got to the Bunnies SIG, and went up and down the hall calling for people who liked rabbits or talking about rabbits to come on in and talk about that, but ... there wasn't much. A couple of people stopped in for a few moments but it was mostly the two of us, plus that friend mentioned from Saturday, hanging out a while. Morphicon was the last convention with a strong species SIG track that we still go to, and it wasn't very strong this year. We realized later there wasn't even a dragons or reptiles SIG, and neither the bunny or procyonid SIG would be well-attended. We missed the Rodents SIG because that ran against my mucking panel, too, but that was just bad luck. I'm curious what happened at the Felines SIG.

The Procyonids SIG was a little better-attended but mostly by virtue of the people who had been there for Bunnies sticking around, plus picking up the guy giving me the trash bins from previous cons. I seem to have become the official holder of the Procyonids SIG trash bins and I hope I'll do honor to them. I was disappointed there wasn't more turnout for this, especially given the movies to talk about --- Guardians of the Galaxy, Jungle Shuffle, Quatsch Ind Die Nasenbaerbande, that sort of thing. When the panel was over I took the uneaten candy and distributed some at Con Suite, some in the gaming room by people working hard upon their beads, and some to the Ice Cream Social.

And the Ice Cream Social was one more thing. I had come as a Sponsor rather than mere attendee because I thought bunny_hugger was too; but, really, the Ice Cream Social was the only thing that I did that she wasn't able to do. They'd had a couple of ice creams including a lactose-free version that I gave a try. It seemed to fit somewhere in the conceptual universe between ice cream and Italian ices. I tossed out the rest of the Procyonids SIG candy here, to people who had no idea why there were Andes Mints or whatnot around but who were glad to have them. I tried advertising them as being from the Procyonids SIG; never too soon to uselessly advertise for next year.

And after that, in the same room, was supposed to be a ``So You Want To Be A Better Programmer'' panel. Computer programmer, convention events programmer? I wasn't sure and the full-sized con booklet was in a whole other room. It didn't matter anyway; apparently the thing was to be run by Draggor, who was still sick. His Furry Puppetry panel --- scheduled opposite the Procyonids SIG --- had also been cancelled. (Also opposite the Procyonids SIG: a Retro Gaming SIG we probably would've gone to if that were possible; and an Amateur Power Lifting event that got cancelled.) It ended up being a bunch of hanging around and people talking over the dregs of ice cream and candy.

Trivia: The sixth month of the Babylonian calendar, Kinninni, was dubbed Ululu in the Semitic calendar and Hyperberetaios in the Seleucid calendar. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2015. Editor C C Finlay.

bunny_hugger would disappear for hours for the rehearsals. I wasn't performing any in the show, so I wasn't allowed in even to peek. This left me time to kick around. I spent most of my time in the game room, some of it playing Dance Dance Revolution badly. They also had an Xbox game called Kinectimals, which promised to let one interact with video-game bears using nothing but the motion of your body. This was a hollow lie.

The first irritation is that it took forever get the Kinect thing working. I think I'm decent at following directions like ``stand still'', but the blasted thing would not register my existence or any of my motions. I was ready to give up on that after a half-hour of pointless fidgeting, but the guys running the game room swore I was almost there. Fine. We got to the game. It offered about seven weeks' worth of prologue and explanation that was inaudible because it was a video game room and the sound was not turned up too high. It seemed to be offering the chance to select a bear to play. Fine. Presumably there is some way of selecting your choices here. I couldn't figure it out. After another ten minutes of fidgeting I was able to swap around a ring of bears, and sometimes to touch a magic box that apparently implied something was changing somewhere about something. I don't know what. Nobody could give me a clear idea what I was supposed to do. Despite the people promising me that I was almost there and ready to start playing I gave up in disgust. I realize some of the problem is I was unfamiliar with this interface, but I believe user interfaces should be designed so that even if you just start doing stuff at random you will get some hints that something has happened. Also, good grief, if you are expecting to play a game about bears, and you're shown a bear, it is not my unreasonable expectation to think that moving the cursor to touch the bear ought to select that stupid bear already.

So, disgusted, I went off to a Playstation or something and played Pinball Arcade. In one game of Tales of the Arabian Nights I beat all five standard-level challenges and took the grand championship. I grant the game may have been reset for the convention.

So that fiasco was enough to bring me to the start of the Spectacle of Doom, where I got a nice up-front seat. Since I'd been at much of the casting call I'd heard the prototype of many of the sketches, and could see how a couple complete rehearsals and experiments with the cast had revised what was done into what could be done. bunny_hugger had the noble role of serving as a major puppeteer. She had this ostrich puppet, just purchased from the book store, who was clearly born to be a star. Besides a nice big expressive head, the wings allow hands to fit in so he can gesture the way the higher-order Muppets can. bunny_hugger drew more attention with that than I did with my guinea pig puppet. My guinea pig was still fooling people into asking ``wait, is that real?'', but her ostrich has star-level charisma.

bunny_hugger told me she had tried getting the other puppets into the show, but the ostrich just read so well and looked so good there wasn't any competition. Also that she kept kind of finding new places that a puppet could pop up and do things. Her suspicion was that Alkali hadn't done much work with puppets before and so didn't think about them; when he did see her mouthing a song or so, though, he realized he had something and ordered as many to go in as many places as possible.

Trivia: In 1896 New Jersey allowed corporate directors to hold office and conduct business outside the state, provided they maintained an office within New Jersey and paid state chartering fees. By 1901 there were 2,347 corporate charters granted under the new law, and by 1905 corporation fees had allowed the state to eliminate its bonded debt and abolish the state property tax. Source: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit.

Currently Reading: Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2015. Editor Sheila Williams.

PS: A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: characteristic, third in the A-to-Z series.

To start Saturday we went to the Fursuit Parade, of course. bunny_hugger would march in it. I'd just try to watch, and to record the thing on my phone. I got a spot near xolo and a couple other folks who were interested by the description of one of my panels. That was old-fashioned online interacting like by mucks and IRC and whatnot. So I hoped that'd bring more people out to a panel I was running for the first time.

The parade was somewhere around 75 costumers long, which isn't bad considering the con is (deliberately) about 350-people strong. It took about two and a half minutes to get past us and then we ran outside for photographs. bunny_hugger's strategy of waiting in the prep area to be one of the last people who gets in the parade paid off. There were a few people crowding her in the group photo but she was pretty visible. And the handful of times someone got in front of her, at least her rabbit head could be staring ominously over someone's shoulder.

It's been joked furries only have kids as costuming projects. Someone was apparently living up to that goal: they had a maybe two-year-old dressed as Rocket Raccoon. The kid was exactly the right size; he looked like a raccoon standing up. Also since he was wearing a raccoon mask in the bright sunlight and hot weather he was just a little fidgety and cranky and so was perfectly cast, right up to the point he yanked his mask off. He'll probably be able to play Rocket come Halloween, but he'll be a touch big to be a perfect raccoon by then. The moment was just perfect.

For lunch we resolved not to drive across the highway and the traffic jam there. We went instead to a mediterranean restaurant in the strip mall across the regular street. There we discovered it was a much nicer restaurant than we figured and that the mall had an indoors too; it's just surrounded by a strip mall. And though we worried the restaurant would be so nice it'd serve us slowly, it was perfectly speedy.

Then we blew that time-saved. We had repeatedly seen a costume shop in past years, in a strip mall near the burrito place. We figured to get glow sticks and such for the dance that night. We forgot that the place was north of the highway and got caught up in the traffic jam anyway. Still. Maybe you wondered what kind of costume shop operates year-round north of Worthington, Ohio. It's pretty near the same costume shop that pops up in empty storefronts in October, just, they're around all year apparently. We did get a fair bunch of glowsticks and were tempted by but didn't actually get any other costumes or props. If we had more time we'd probably have brainstormed something to get.

Among the flyers at the shop was one for an alien-encounters convention. I'm honestly sorry I didn't take one. Who knew Columbus hosted alien-encounters conventions?

Trivia: While stricken with smallpox in 1562, Queen Eliabeth commanded the Privy Council to appoint Robert Dudley as Lord Protector of England, at a salary of £ 20,000 pa. Dudley's assistant Tamworth was also to be given a pension of £ 500 pa. Source: The Life Of Elizabeth I, Allison Weir.

Currently Reading: Hierarchies, John T Philliphent.

We slept in Friday, figuring that we could go to the opening ceremonies, then lunch, then back for the first scheduled panel bunny_hugger was hosting. This wasn't a bad plan. Opening ceremonies were efficiently done, and introduced a really cool concept we hope gets carried over in future years. Added to the services was the opening of a story about some threat to reality breaking in and only eight-bit video game characters being able to save the day. To that end, they were giving out colored plastic beads that could be put into patterns and melted into sprite-like renderings of people. Congoers were given the task of making as many of these figures as possible over the weekend.

To get beads, tough, you'd have to hand over coupons, given out at panels and Artist's Alley and the dealers' room and the dances and so on. This we also liked as a nice way to encourage people going to events they might otherwise have skipped. It's a good idea, although by Sunday bead-color discipline had almost completely broken down and people could just scoop up as many of whatever color they needed. As panel hosts we also got tickets for colors to pass out, but I don't think we drew anyone extra to the panels for the sake of bead coupons. Overall, it's a good idea; it maybe just needs tweaking. Or experience, since this was new to the con's attendees.

Going out to eat was a good enough idea --- the con suite had plenty of food, but little of it vegetarian --- except that we went towards the Frisch's Big Boy, to the north. This forced us to cross the highway, and the highway bridge under construction, and lumped us into an awful, awful traffic jam. There was nothing the night before. It's just a jam that appears around the lunch hours, apparently, and would vex us since we had only the hour to go, eat, and get back. We made it, though, and noticed once again it was Dress Like Big Boy For A Free Sandwich weekend.

On the way back we discovered what gathering had rented out the part of the hotel Morphicon didn't have. I thought it was the charity, a feline rescue group, moving their cats into the hotel. It wasn't a rack full of kittens, though: they were rabbits. The other group was the American Netherland Dwarf Rabbit Club, and they revealed that this was the weekend of some major rabbit-fanciers gathering. There would be hotels full of people and their rabbits all over Columbus. It seems like a missed opportunity for Morphicon this year, somehow, moreso than the usual Dress As Big Boy day.

The panel to attend was bunny_hugger's. She gave Letterboxing a rest this year, and instead used the Retro Gaming theme to organize a talk about pinball. I served as assistant, or as the con booklet put it, the panel organizer. It was fun, though. She talked some about the history of pinball and showed off pictures she'd taken of particularly furry-themed or relevant pinball artwork (there are a lot of robot women in pinball backglasses), and we lead off talking about our experiences with the games. People joined in talking about their experiences with pinball, or asking questions about the games, and in all it felt really good.

I'd worried people would be expecting an actual pinball machine at the panel. It would've been great, but we just don't have one, and didn't know anyone we could get to bring one. Maybe next year. Or we might bring the Wii and set that up with virtual tables; the squirrel-themed Goin' Nuts, for example, would be perfectly good silly play.

Trivia: The Franklin Base Ball Club, organized in Detroit in 1857, is the first club west of New York known to use the Knickerbocker --- the main ancestor of modern baseball --- rules. Source: But Didn't We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843 - 1870, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.

PS: Reading The Comics, May 22, 2015: Might Be Giving Up Mickey Mouse Edition, third of these mathematics posts since the last roundup. Spoiler: I might be giving up reviewing Mickey Mouse comic strips because they turn out to be reruns.

And now, finally, I can get to reporting on Morphicon! Our trip started on Thursday, because happily they moved the convention to what's a long weekend for bunny_hugger, and we could start out at a reasonable hour around noon to drive to her parents' place. This let us drop off our pet rabbit, who'd stay with them. It also let us see just how their pet dogs are declining; they are legitimately getting into worse shape. We had lunch, and talked about what we expected the con to be, and then were on our way to pass Ann Arbor and head to Ohio.

Morphicon's hotel, a Holiday Inn that's properly in Worthington rather than Columbus, had something new when we arrived. They handed a Code of Conduct that we were to read and sign, and the people at check-in assured us that Mr Wright (?) had approved it. The code specified against things like excessively loud parties or harassing non-con-goers at the hotel. We had no idea there'd been any harassment of non-con-goers. Part of the fun of the convention is that it doesn't fill the hotel so we always have some meeting-of-alternate-worlds with people who have no idea why there's all these people in mascot outfits at their hotel room. We never would get an explanation of what the code was about, either. It just ... prohibited stuff.

Among the banned things were ``the kinds of behavior called 'horseplay','' or something to that effect. It wasn't just a banning of horseplay, nor of ``horseplay'' in scare quotes, but of behavior called ``horseplay''. It all suggests some kind of incident and we couldn't think of what might have happened last year. bunny_hugger had the recollection that last year some particularly uptight social group shared the convention --- she remembered some stern glares given to mystee's dancing last year --- and perhaps that group complained a lot. We'd share the hotel with a different group this year.

But the important thing to do was eat, which we decided to do when we found out registration wasn't open yet. We went back to the burrito place we visited last year. We'd thought it was a shaky new burrito spot last year and learned it had actually been open nearly a whole year. It just had that chaotic air about it suggesting a state of perpetual emergency and maybe short life. But it's still there, and it was much calmer and more orderly this time around. The burritos are good, though, very customizable and with sauces hot enough that even I can't quite take them. Also I realized I could look at just a few seconds of whatever sitcom was on Nick at Nite with the TV volumes turned way down and want to slug everybody in the show. bunny_hugger believes the show was Full House. I didn't recognize it.

Trivia: In his 1873 patent application Thomas Edison named his telegraph duplexer a ``diplex''. An undated diagram from his 1873 notebooks also lists a ``Fourplex, No. 14'' and the note ``Why not?'' Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum.